Seldom if ever have I seen so successful a translation from book to screen as was achieved by the now-ended program, The Expanse. Covering the first six in an excellent nine-book series by James S.A. Corey (pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), who were deeply involved with the program as well, the show stuck pretty close to the books, but never hesitated to make changes when something that worked on paper might not have on screen. (Best of all was the "promotion" of the minor book character Camina Drummer to a major character in the series.)

In any case, the show concluded this week, and I have some preliminary thoughts about it.

Where has C.J. Cherry been all my life?

Where has C.J. Cherryh been all my life? An SFWA Grandmaster since 2016, she has been producing hard science fiction and space operas since 1976, yet — unless some of her short fiction has crossed my path — I am almost certain that none of her novels have until now.

I'm going to blame that reader's omission on the fact she has been published by DAW Books, which for decades was an outfit whose covers somehow read amateurish to me. With very few exceptions, nothing published by DAW ever weighted my shelves.

Pity that, if Cherryh's Foreigner is anything at all to go by.

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It's not news that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I have a soft spot for space opera; I confess, the big space base (which I initially mistook for a starship of some sort) adorning the cover of Neal Asher's novel, The Departure, helped sell me on it. As it turned out though, The Departure hardly qualifies as space-opera and only squeaks by as science fiction pretty much the way Superman does: on technicalities. Though it's set in the future and some of the action takes place in orbit and on Mars, the book is really just a narrated first-person shooter dressed up in some SF tropes — a corrupt and incompetent world government, artificial intelligence, robotic weapons and a trans-human genesis. But all that is only window-dressing. That spectacular cover is a gateway to lugubrious dialogue, sophomoric libertarian philosophy, hackneyed world-building and, especially, to one pornographic blood-bath after another. The Departure is one of the worst books I have read in a very long time. More boring than Atlas Shrugged (which I reviewed a while back), it drips with just as much contempt for ordinary human beings. Unlike Rand's John Galt though, Asher's superman does much of his killing at first-hand. Does this novel have any redeeming qualities? The short answer is "no". The long answer lives behind this link.

Photo of Kim Stanley Robinson by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Sᴜɴᴅᴀʏ, Aᴜɢᴜsᴛ 9, 2020 — Kim Stanley Robinson became one of my favourite writers with his novel, Red Mars and its sequels. His work has been uneven since then, but not to the point where I have stopped paying attention when he releases a new novel.

Galileo's Dream was released in late 2009, and I read and reviewed it shortly after. This review was originally published on Rex on January 19, 2010.

I have recovered it thanks, once again, to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Click here to read the full review.

Samuel R. Delany (2012?). Photo lifted from his Facebook page.

June 21, 2020 — Now 78 years old, Samuel R. Delany is a multiple award-winning writer and a retired professor of English literature. He is best known as a science fiction writer, but his work encompasses not only that genre, but fantasy, comics and pornography, as well as non-fiction.

His first novel was published in the early 1960s, when he was still a teenager, and his most recent (which I have on order) was published only last week. He is, to my mind, still the best living American writer, and his 2012 masterpiece, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, was a radical (and very successful — I hope to have a review of it up here soon!) fusion of gay erotica with science fiction.

Despite the genres mentioned above, Delany's books are anything but alike; he is a writer forever exploring and both de- and re-constructing genre tropes and conventions.

So, when I bought Dark Reflections back in 2009, I was not really surprised to be surprised by just how very different that novel was from those that had come before.

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This review was originally published on June 6, 2009. Links and pricing information may be out of date.

 

 

October 12, 2020 — I imagine that most of us these days have their personal "favourites" among well-made television programs that, in the end (or sooner), we felt betrayed by.

I never did watch Lost and I bailed on Game of Thrones a few episodes after the red wedding. I had been enjoying the show, but also realized that I couldn't identify most of the characters by name, which is never a good sign. From all I've heard and read since the finale, I missed much style but little substance.

I did, though, watch all of Battlestar Galactica, including its side-series, and had my fingers crossed right to the bitter end that show-runner Ronald D. Moore knew what he was doing.

More fool, I.

I haven't revisited the show since I reviewed the finale back on the 22nd of March, 2009, but I have no doubt I would still agree with my younger self if I were to do it. "Explaining" 71 episodes and two movies worth of plot and mysteries by saying that "God did it" has to rank very near the top of the cop-out hall-of-fame.

I've given away the ending, but if you'd like to read my original review, click here. (Note: I modified the original headline, which read: "Not with a bang: The end of Battlestar Galactica through the mother of all SF cliches".